How to Nurture Talent While in Startup Mode

by

Neil Persaud

Chief People Officer, CXA Group

CXA-- a company that is in startup mode-- has defined their competitive edge: focus on upskilling and reskilling employees. CXA’s Chief People Officer shares how they are preparing employees for the future of work, and explains how CXA ensures its workforce remains relevant.

CXA’s definition of a competitive workforce

The only way we can out-compete the global firms in the insurance brokerage industry, is to have the very best talent. Our vision helped us attract employees who wanted to make an impact in the workplace combatting Asia’s chronic disease burden.

To nurture this competitive workforce, we built the CXA Academy, which offers a combination of soft, technical, and leadership skills training together with insurance and healthcare knowledge.

According to the Ministry of Manpower, our start-up provides 30% more training than the huge multinational companies (MNCs).

We offer growth opportunities and career pathing to retain our top talent. We create agile cross-functional teams, which allows for exposure and growth. Our people love being able to see how their work directly leads to the company’s success, and they are motivated by the ability we provide to move much faster than they could in big companies.

In CXA, the culture of open communication and collaboration provides a healthy environment for professional growth and high performance. Our leaders walk the talk by engaging across functions and levels to listen to our people, amplifying insightful ideas, and actioning feedback. Unlike traditional firms, our flat organisational structure allows us to work closely with our business leaders in executing great ideas very quickly.

To remain competitive, we leverage technology to raise productivity. The integration of people and machines will lead to new job categories that provide our employees a more meaningful work experience. For example, with the automation of data analytics and dashboards, our client services managers are able to spend more time interacting with our clients on their evolving needs; hence providing them with timely value-added services that solve their pain points and achieve maximal return on investment on their benefits plan.

How CXA prepares employees for the future of work

Surviving in an age of constant disruption requires the workforce to have the digital skills and knowledge needed to innovate products with adaptable business models.

Job roles are evolving at lightning speeds with rapid growth in the adoption of technology, automation, and robotics. Agility, adaptability, reskilling, and upskilling have become non-negotiable elements in terms of workforce mindset, capabilities, and business constructs.

At CXA, we attract talented people with strong digital skills and deep knowledge in insurance, healthcare and benefits, data science, and machine learning. We put our best people in an environment that encourages innovation. This is made possible by having cross-functional development teams work alongside our business leaders to stay on top of client needs. The exchange of ideas challenges how we think and approach the business and operating model to create higher value-added offerings focused on solving our client pain points.

We work closely with our leaders to groom a future-ready workforce. We invest in targeted programmes to reskill and upskill our employees to undertake evolving job roles amid increased use of automation and new operating models at work. We organise regular knowledge sharing forums by our leaders and partners on industry insights and thought leadership.

In this uncertain world, how can companies continue to evolve while retaining their DNA?

Passion and purpose at work. CXA’s employees are deeply passionate about leveraging existing corporate spend to combat Asia’s worsening chronic disease burden. They find meaning in their work as their contributions are directly linked to our company’s mission to enable employees to lead healthier, happier lives.

The ability to give our employees a meaningful purpose at work helps to differentiate our value proposition and attract top candidates in the war for talent. We hire talented individuals who are passionate about our mission, adaptable, and desirous of innovating to disrupt the employee benefits landscape. We are relentless in refreshing our job roles to stay relevant and create value in delivering real outcomes to our clients.

We believe in bringing together a broad range of experiences and perspectives that people of diverse backgrounds can bring. This diversity and inclusion creates a dynamic, vibrant, and innovative environment.

CXA’s open and collaborative culture underpins our ability to engage and inspire our multigenerational workforce in the open exchange of ideas, sparking innovation. Our highly experienced industry and functional experts impart their knowledge to our younger workforce, serving as mentors and role models, and allows us to hold true to CXA’s DNA amidst rapid growth.

How CXA differentiates itself from competitors

Traditional models of one-size-fits-all benefits will not deliver the performance and behaviours that businesses require — what motivates someone with a young family is going to be very different to what motivates a new graduate or someone working their way to retirement. CXA’s model converts what companies spend on employee healthcare into a mobile wallet, so employees decide how much insurance they need and can shift their unused dollars into wellness services such as yoga, mindfulness or diabetes management.

So rather than waiting for your employees to get sick, or be hospitalised, to benefit from your existing treatment spend, CXA enables you to repurpose part of that spend into early detection and disease prevention.

CXA aggregates all of your vendors into a consolidated platform so that companies can access holistic, data-driven health management solutions that improve employee health, workplace engagement and productivity. These can range from redesigning benefit programmes to rewarding healthier behaviour, to controlling provider and prescription costs with tele-health and e-pharmacies, and even the use of chronic disease management providers to attack high cost claims.

CXA is the ecosystem for the workplace, capturing health data at the source through integration with insurers, health screener, wellness and chronic disease providers. We now have over 1000+ discounted wellness offers in our marketplace for employees to purchase with mobile wallet or credit card. Our mobile apps eliminate paper claims and the need for employees to pay out of pocket and wait for reimbursements.

We believe that having the data and tools to improve employee engagement and health and demonstrate ROI for employers will be the key to transforming employee benefits.